Pop Pedagogies Lightning Talks

Patrick Moran, Associate Professor, FHIS

I'm currently teaching FREN 417 (French Popular Fiction) and have focused this year’s course on games as popular fiction/games as narrative. The course is designed around three main clusters: boardgames, TTRPGs, and video games, with a sprinkling of gamebooks, escape rooms, and LARPs. We examine some of the classic theoretical questions raised by game studies – the MDA framework, the GNS model, or the concept of ludo-narrative dissonance – through the lens of French game culture and what sets it apart from the Anglosphere. We examine such cultural tropes as the “French Touch” in video games or the Eurogame-Ameritrash debate in boardgames, as well as the broader cultural impact of French creators and practices (such as Bruno Faidutti’s article on “Postcolonial Catan”). And – it goes without saying – we play a lot of French-language games in French! Assignments are on a choose-your-own-adventure basis and involve forum discussions, game-session reports and a final paper or video essay that can be a scholarly study or a piece of creative game design.

Sara Ann Knutson, Assistant Professor of Teaching in History/Medieval Studies

Abbie Collett, UBC History and Medieval Studies undergraduate student

In this presentation, we examine the process of redesigning curriculum at the level of an assignment and a lesson plan to better support students’ critical learning and analysis of representations of the Vikings in pop culture and popular media. To conduct this work for the UBC course HIST 300: Vikings: Then and Now, Knutson (the course designer and faculty instructor) mobilized the “Students as Partners” (SaP) approach, a pedagogical method in which participating faculty members and students work together to design course curriculum, pedagogical activities, and assignments in support of improving teaching and learning. This approach actively encourages student partners to share and incorporate their own learning experiences in the classroom into the curriculum redesign project. The faculty instructor established a partnership with Collett, a former student of HIST 300, and together, we worked to redesign a popular media analysis assignment and created a specific, popular-media focused lesson plan to provide more specialized, scaffolded support for student learning of popular media analysis and historicizing skills in advance of their work on the popular media assignment. We will share our final products as well as our individual and collective experiences of integrating popular culture and media into the upper-level History course.

Alifa Bandali, Assistant Professor of Teaching, GRSJ

This talk will explore the importance of the media and popular culture in teaching, learning and academic spaces. In particular, I will be sharing on teaching resources and assignments that take seriously critical thinking skills, media literacy and intersectional approaches. Developing the Disclaimer is a project illustrating the significance around the genre of the disclaimer, especially in teaching materials.

Victoria Rahbar, PhD Candidate in the iSchool /Department of Asian Studies

The Accessible Arts and Popular Culture Workshop was a Pop Pedagogies Award Program funded project that explored the relationship between touch and the arts through student-focused programming on non-visual engagements with Ainu traditional crafts and Japanese popular culture. The workshop included a panel of information professionals from the GLAM sector sharing their knowledge before an activity portion involving a touch tour and tactile art room distributed at multiple learning stations. The workshop spoke to how the arts and popular culture can be taught as a form of multi-sensory art appreciation, non-visual and tactile experiences made possible by libraries, art galleries, and museums supporting accessible engagement opportunities, with a focus on media from Japan.

The Accessible Arts and Popular Culture Workshop was held on iSchool Community Learning Day 2025 with contributions from V. Rahbar (UBC iSchool), Chelsea Shriver (UBC Library), Tomoko Kitayama Yen (UBC Library), Dr. Akiko Takesue (Royal Ontario Museum), and Kay Slater (grunt gallery) with students mostly coming from the UBC iSchool. Two student graphic recorders were also hired to document the workshop, Miriam and Care of the UBC iSchool.

My Pop Pedagogies Lightning Talks will 1. briefly describe the workshop and associated teaching resources, 2. highlight the comic art of two graphic recorders who carefully documented the workshop using arts-based journalism, and 3. offer an opportunity for attendees to engage with art non-visually and by touch through an interactive table featuring the workshop materials.

Zoe Lam, Lecturer in Cantonese Language and Culture, Asian Studies

Rosalie Gunawan, Education and Public Programs Manager, Chinese Canadian Museum

This lightning talk reflects on Cantopop in Canada: Songwriting and Performing Identity, a publicly engaged pedagogical initiative that brought Cantonese-language instruction beyond the classroom and into a museum setting. Hosted at the Chinese Canadian Museum in January 2026, the event featured a fireside panel with Vancouver-based Cantonese singer-songwriters Ching Choi (蔡紫晴) and handwash (手洗), moderated by a UBC Cantonese Language Program instructor, and attended by students from beginner, intermediate, and advanced Cantonese courses alongside members of the public. Framed within the museum’s exhibition Dream Factory: Cantopop Mandopop 1980s–2000, the event positioned Cantopop as both a cultural archive and a living, evolving practice in the Chinese Canadian diaspora.

The talk examines how Cantopop functioned as a pedagogical tool for teaching language and identity. Students engaged with popular music not only as listeners but as analysts and creators, exemplified by a CNTO 403 student video project that combined lyrical analysis of contemporary Cantonese rap with the composition of an original Cantonese song. The program also included a curator’s tour of the Dream Factory feature exhibition led by the museum’s CEO and exhibition head curator, highlighting how material culture, karaoke, and soundscapes can deepen linguistic and cultural learning.

By integrating popular media, public history, and creative production, this project models a collaborative, non-traditional pop pedagogy that bridges university teaching and community knowledge. The talk argues that Cantopop offers a powerful entry point for discussions of diaspora, cultural continuity, and decolonial language practices, demonstrating how popular culture can move from the margins to the centre of pedagogy while fostering student engagement, critical reflection, and cultural literacy.

Alicia Matthews, Student in Education and MA Graduate

How can cognitive autonomy survive under the attention economy? What are the forces behind the algorithmic feedback loops that determine what is seen on social media feeds? In an age of increasing technocracy, cybernetic control and polarization, how might we mitigate widening ideological gaps, confront social atomization and question our own media consumption habits? These are pertinent questions discussed in popular culture, yet the societal and psychological effects of media in the digital age remain understudied in academia. This seminar aims to bridge that gap through interdisciplinary inquiry into the evolution of media and propaganda. With critical readings, field research, and a collaborative digital humanities project, students will investigate the mechanisms of mass media, culture and power. Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned that “World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no divisions between military and civilian participation”. This implicates the masses as active agents in the media ecosystem, complicit in memetic warfare yet capable of resistance against it. In an era where decentralized propaganda flows through memes, targeted ads, influencer culture, and artificial intelligence, this seminar allows students to gain an in-depth understanding of media’s roles in shaping both their own worldviews and larger power structures.

Andrew McIlvaney, Educator and Student in Language and Literacy Education

This talk presents a brief overview of Comedy Writing 11, a high school course designed as an alternative to the standard Creative Writing 11 offered in BC school districts. The class engages students in writing and analyzing humour across forms such as stand-up, sitcoms, comedic memoir, and late-night talk show segments. Its primary goal is not for students to produce “hilarious” content, but rather to cultivate a writer’s personal voice, develop collaborative writing strategies, explore how humour functions, and gain a deeper appreciation for it. So far the results have been so good… it’s not even funny.

Additionally, a key component of the course is how comedy serves as a non-didactic approach to teaching Hilary Janks’ concept of critical literacy. Students analyze how satirical comedy sketches construct meaning, interrogate power, and reflect social norms; in a final project, they then apply these insights in their own comedy writing. Assignments also encourage reflection on the ethics of humour, locating “the line,” and interrogating the distinction between “punching up” and “punching down.”

In this Lightning Talk, I will pack the entirety of this course into one humourless 5–7 minute session, sharing course resources, classroom activities, and how you too can creatively interpret the BC curriculum to run courses like this yourself.

Conan Lee, MA Graduate, Faculty of Education

Popular culture is often used in science education to make scientific concepts more accessible and engaging. However, its potential as a pedagogical approach for critically examining the social, ethical, and political dimensions of science remains underexplored. This talk introduces an immersive, role-based learning workshop that uses cinematic narratives to anchor interdisciplinary dialogue around complex scientific and social issues.

Supported by the UBC Pop Pedagogies Award Program, the workshop leverages popular film—specifically Avatar—as an entry point for exploring environmental science alongside issues of power, ethics, and reconciliation. Participants step into diverse stakeholder roles within a fictional scenario, collaboratively navigating environmental dilemmas that reflect real-world scientific, policy, and societal challenges.

By integrating popular media with experiential learning, this approach demonstrates how cinematic narratives can enhance student learning while fostering critical thinking, empathy, communication, and teamwork. Drawing on data from recent pilot sessions, this talk will share insights into the workshop’s design process, classroom and outreach applications, and preliminary evidence of its impact on learner engagement and outcomes. Attendees will also learn about the project’s ongoing development and potential opportunities for collaboration.

Stephanie Broder, Graduate Student, Fine Arts/Creative Writing

As a comic artist and character illustrator, creating characters has always been a part of my identity exploration and expression, especially around gender and other fluid aspects of self. This workshop introduces the possibilities of creating alter-egos through simple character illustrations, allowing even those without art training or limited drawing experience to play with their own illustrated identities. Drawing on the work of identity-play photographers Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee for inspiration, I posit that illustration offers the same pathways of fluidity, drag, disguise, and costuming as photographic self-portraiture. Through a dice-based illustration exercise, participants immediately jump into a sense of play and experimentation in character illustration, taking it home to continue building a growing arsenal of alternate selves. Participants are encouraged to think of their illustrated characters however they feel empowering: drag-sonas or gender-bends, core aspects of their personality or internal family systems, shadow selves, superhero alter-egos, or more. We will discuss how fluidity, as an identity concept, can encompass growth and self-actualization without requiring “stability” to be an end goal. And fluidity can apply to more than just gender and sexuality, where the word is traditionally housed. Fluid experiences can encompass disability/ability and mental illness/wellness dichotomies and perhaps many more. Participants are encouraged to consider which aspects of their identity “fluid” accurately describes and how they might represent those aspects of self through character illustration.

Raymond Pai, Lecturer in Cantonese Language and Culture, Asian Studies

This presentation theorizes an interdisciplinary pedagogical project that positions Cantonese stand-up comedy as a site of critical language learning, performative practice, and heritage language (HL) identity work. Implemented within the UBC Cantonese Language Program and developed in partnership with the Vancouver Chinatown Storytelling Centre, the project draws on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), theories of performativity (Butler, 1990), and scholarship on heritage language learner investment and identity (Norton, 2013; Leeman, 2015).

Conceptually, the project reframes humor as more than engaging content. Stand-up comedy functions as a performative discourse through which speakers negotiate identity, stance, and power. Exposure to live and recorded Cantonese comedy provides learners with dense pragmatic input: tone, irony, indexicality, and sociolinguistic positioning, supporting not only listening and speaking proficiency but also metapragmatic awareness. From a performativity perspective, language learning is treated as embodied practice: students engage with voice, timing, gesture, and audience alignment, recognizing fluency as socially enacted rather than merely structurally acquired.

Grounded in critical pedagogy, comedy becomes a vehicle for interrogating language ideologies, racialization, migration narratives, and linguistic hierarchies. Students move from interpreting humor to producing reflective monologues and public-facing narratives, transforming popular media consumption into critical cultural production. This shift aligns with HL research emphasizing learner agency, affect, and identity negotiation in multilingual contexts. The project bridged academia, popular culture, and public education to deepen understanding of how humor can be used to teach language and illuminate personal and social histories (Lam & Pai, 2024).